Manage your leadership gap:

Let’s talk about what I call the leadership gap.  Do you think that leaders should be good at what they do or great at what they do?

Be careful, it’s a trick question.  The right answer is... both.

You should be great at what is weak in others but important to the success of your organization.

And you should be good at what you need others to be good at.  By ‘good’ I mean slightly better than them.

Here’s why.  Most of us are not motivated by ‘great’ because we believe that ‘great’ is out of our reach.  But we will aim to be good, even to be better than the leader, because we know that good is possible.

The trick is never to make the leadership gap so big that no one can follow you.  Better to lead from only a few steps ahead.  Else you will be admired from afar by people who are no longer followers.

I’m James McIntosh at nonsenseatwork dot com

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© 2009 James Henry McIntosh